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From an artistic point of view, Tim Schafer's career is a triumph. After all, this is the man behind some of LucasArts' most beloved adventure titles, including Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. From a commercial standpoint, though, Tim's best games have been a bit of a disappointment. For all the originality and fun they contained and the mountains of praise heaped on them, they've never been what you'd call big sellers. Hopefully, history won't repeat itself with Schafer's latest title, Psychonauts. The game was dropped by Microsoft just before release, so we can only hope that new publisher Majesco gives it the promotion it needs, lest another of Schafer's masterpieces sinks into the black hole of retail obscurity.

Psychonauts concerns the adventures of a young boy named Razputin ("Raz" for short) who runs away from home to Whispering Rocks Psychic Summer Camp. In addition to arts and crafts and campfire sing-alongs, Whispering Rocks offers advanced training to future generations of America's foremost psychic warriors, the Psychonauts. It's Raz's dream to become a psychonaut, and nothing, not even a giant psychic fish in the lake or a conspiracy to take over the world, is going to stop him.

That brief story summary, though, doesn't even begin to convey the care that Schafer and his team have lavished on their alternate psychic reality. If there's any one thing that Psychonauts does really well, it's proving just how important good writing and a solid storyline can be to a videogame. Psychonauts has both, and much of the impetus to work your way through the game is just to get to the next twist of the storyline or hear the next bit of brilliant dialogue. Everything story-related in the game, from the long, incredibly funny cut-scenes to the throwaway one-liners, are well-written and voiced to perfection by a talented cast of voice actors.

Psychonauts is also an absolute triumph of art direction. The world of Whispering Rocks is a bizarre collection of freakishly tilted trees, weirdly-angled buildings, and human campers that deserve to be called "human" only by dint of the fact that I don't know what else to call them. As odd as the "real world" of Whispering Rocks is, though, they pale in comparison to the surreal dreamscapes of the minds that Raz must pass through on his way to unraveling the conspiracy.

One of a psychonaut's major powers, you see, is the ability to travel inside another person's mind in order to glean information. These through-the-looking-glass trips make up a large portion of the gameplay. These mind trips are pretty much standard platform fare. There are all sorts of obstacles to overcome, platforms and jumping puzzles to solve, enemies to shoot, secrets to discover, and a variety of knickknacks to collect. As players progress through the game, they acquire more psychic powers that they'll need to get them through harder levels, all of which are fun to use and pretty easy to learn. The play balance and challenge in these levels is remarkably good, as well. The game is neither so difficult so as to require the reflexes of a ferret on a double espresso, nor so easy that Psychonauts becomes little more than a glorified adventure game.

What really makes these trips special, though, is that every mind that Raz enters is a reflection of the real person. That means that they're all wildly different. From the war-torn landscape of Coach Oleander's brain to the black-and-white cubist landscape of uber-agent Sasha Nein to a trip through the lava lamp dance party of agent Milla Vodello, every level is a feast for the eyes. My personal favorite was the one that resembled one of those cheesy black velvet paintings you find in stands along the side of the road.